Montreal artist, Jacques Deshaies exhibtion of rupestrian neo-conceptual art in the Protein Gallery, April 25 - 1 September, 2003.

"The Human Genome Odyssey - Proteome"

The Museum, with the artist, will be presenting rupestrian neo-conceptual genome art usually not presented in this space. This natural history museum with its collections of botany, vertabrates and invertabrates, and Earth sciences, housed in a magnificient victorian castle, does not exactly qualifies it as "art museum". But in fact, it provides an actual and theoritical space to see and think about rupestrian neo-conceptual art - "The Human Genome Odyssey - Proteome" - it's a heaven for experiencing it without the distraction of other contemporary art.

It is not the authority of the Museum as such that accomplishes this, but rather a virtue bestowed on the Museum by its leader, Ms Joanne DiCosimo, by the "The Geee in Genome" project leader Ms Carol Thiessen, by the science educator of the project Ms Caroline Lanthier, by the institution's staff, and by its audience. The Canadian Museum of Nature has not removed itself from the philosophical and ethical debate on the genome. In fact, in this regard, they are "avant-garde". It is not important if anyone can live up to Kant's canon : art for art sake. The point here is dialogue and discovery not devotion.

The exhibition : "The Protein Gallery"

The art is neo-conceptual in its essence, figurative in form, post-naïve in its style, critical as a gesture. It aknowledges pressing bioethical issues and is a link that reduces the criterion of avant-garde art to its most essantial condition, that of ideas. By exploring the opposite of the same theme, the dichotomy between the brutal (rupestrian protein with horse to hunt) and the meditative (gold metal protein on sienna background), in painting protein figures (intellectual) in a floral post-naïve genre. The art register shifts from the private to the social and public dimension of the upcoming new DNA culture era. The person who stands before this art experiences vision as a cognitive activity and it's power to show pure folly and pure beauty at the same time.

"Artist, go genome!"

Deoxyribonucleiquely yours.